


Whiskey Deadeye

by JauntyHako



Series: Pacific Watch [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Other, Pacific Rim AU, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 10:28:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10384653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JauntyHako/pseuds/JauntyHako
Summary: The Jaeger Program finds Jesse McCree half dead in an illegally constructed Jaeger that almost took out one of their best. They are not known to waste resources.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally meant to be just a snippet for a request I got on tumblr. Three thousand words later it's becoming a series. There will be at least two other parts revolving around Jack and Gabriel respectively.

At 15:34 that day the Deadlock Jaeger boots up for the first time and initiates the neural handshake with its sole pilot, name and background unknown.

At 15:41 Lechuza Renegade is deployed to take it down and prevent a mass murder in the urban areas of Santa Fe.

Lechuza Renegade arrives at 16:47. The battle lasts three hours.

 

“It was a goddamn miniature mech cobbled together in a garage by teenagers with too much time on their hands! What the hell took you so long?”

Gabriel Reyes and his co-pilot take the reprimand with quietly grinding teeth. They don’t say the smaller size made it impossible to hit. It was in and out before their Jaeger could react and its smaller weaponry allowed for aimbot technology the likes of which their own can’t profit from. It was like trying to squash a fly. A panicked fly with a gun.

They don’t say all that because it’s in their report, the same the Marshal pokes at like it personally offended him.

“We did our best, sir.” Reyes says. “And we brought the mech in for study.”

“For study, great! If you haven’t noticed we have a full bay of the damn things, we don’t need some scrap heap out of Deadlock gorge!”

“Sir, respectfully, I disagree.”

The Marshal sighs and rubs his temples, then says with somewhat more patience than he awards his rangers: “Yes, agent?”

You step forward, and show him the files in your arms. They’re scans of the Deadlock mech’s blueprints, drawn on wrapping paper, walls and at least once on somebody’s arm. It’s taken hours to muddle through the chaos and find the genius at the bottom of the shithole.

“The Deadlock Jaeger-”  
“It’s not a Jaeger, agent, don’t insult our own engineers by calling it one.”  
You hesitate briefly.  
“Very well. The Deadlock mech was built almost entirely from scratch based off our own Jaegers with limited resources. We have no idea how they managed to reverse engineer the technology but I believe we can use their mech to cut construction costs of new Jaegers by nearly thirty percent.”

Thirty percent is a good number and one that soothes even the most ruffled feathers of the higher ups. It’s a good number to ask favours with.

“Sir, if I may.” The Marshal nods and you continue. “I’d like to use the Deadlock mech as a base to built a new, full sized Jaeger. At its current state it doesn’t stand a chance against kaiju but I believe we can adapt most of its technology for a full Mk 3. It’ll be experimental technology, but the benefits, I believe, greatly outweigh the risks.”

He’s not convinced, you can tell. This mech gave him a heap of trouble and he’d rather see it trashed than restored. Reyes saves the day.

“It was damn effective against us. I’d like to see what it can do against a kaiju.” he says, stroking his beard and exchanging glances with his co-pilot. He's always had an eye for talent and this time is no different.

“Oh would you now?” The Marshal shuffles the papers you gave him, showing the picture of tattooed arm, its remaining bare space filled with tiny equations and doodles. “And who do you expect to pilot this flaming pile of polished trash?”

 

Jesse comes to in an unknown bed, surrounded by strange smells and noises. The air feels busy, the tapping of feet rushed as if everyone running past him needs to be somewhere else. Heavy bulkheads open and slam shut and voices ring over an intercom, filled with static and impossible to understand. It smells like oil, copper, engine fumes and microwaveable food. It almost smells like home.

He opens his eyes, looks around. There the waves of hectic action crash against a rock of idleness, lounging in a chair by his bed and seemingly engrossed in paperwork. He takes a closer look, makes sure not to move and give away he’s awake. He spots the insignia of the Jaeger program on an immaculate uniform, its top button popped open. The papers have pictures he recognises; someone took a picture of Martinez’ arm, there are shackles on his wrists almost out of the picture. His heart sinks.

“Good morning.” you say, revealing you’re not as distracted as he first thought. You smile and riddled with fear of being arrested and put in jail it looks smug to him. Everything in him screams to make a run for it, but he’s no idiot. He sees the heavy doors, feels his own throbbing head and knows he won’t get far.

“And you are?” he asks, trying to sound assertive. Vertigo makes short work of his attempt to sit up, although it insults him you didn’t even try to stop him. He _might_ have tried to attack you.

You tell him your name, for what it’s worth, and ask his. He hesitates.

“McCree.” he says, daring you to doubt him. “Jesse McCree.”

“Well, McCree.” you say, putting the papers aside. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Did you know you’re one of only three people to ever successfully pilot solo?”

You sound impressed, although that could be his own ego trying to make him feel better.

“Don’t know if I’d call what I did successful.” he says, rubs the back of his neck. If his Jaeger looks like he feels he totaled the damn thing. He can imagine the reactions back home and wonders if jail is preferable.

“You fought and nearly defeated one of our best ranger teams over three hours of continuous combat, I’d call that- … what’s wrong?”

His face gives him away and he hastily schools it into something he hopes looks more aloof. This is all news to him. At your inquiring look he shuffles away as far as he can in the narrow bed. The sheets are rough when he grasps them.

“What happened in there?” you ask softly, as if you know or have a good idea.

 

Their Jaeger is tiny compared to the things deployed from the Shatterdomes and Martinez assured him he’ll be able to handle the neural load of it alone. Besides, they know little to nothing about drift compatibility and what to look for. Jesse will suffice as their guinea pig and he agrees all too readily, itching with the chance to pilot a real Jaeger. Deadlock Gang will rule the entire south with one of these bad boys.

The drift hits him broadside and leaves him spinning. He never paid much attention to the mumbo jumbo about reliving past memories. At most, he figured, he’d get some flashes, sounds or images that’d be gone before he knew it. And besides, it’s only his own head he’s in, it’s not like he’s carrying someone else’s baggage as well.

His own baggage is enough. The last thing he hears is Martinez’s countdown, the Jaeger booting up, screeching metal and roaring engines and then he’s back in that tiny apartment in Santa Fe he grew up in and the stink of unwashed clothes and alcohol fills his nose and makes him gag. There are other memories as well but it’s that one that traps him, forces him out of the cockpit and into the body of his twelve-year old self as he cowers in his room and flinches at the sound of bottles shattering against walls. His mother screams at his father and brother at the top of her lungs, hysteria and drunk slurring mangling her words until all he hears are threats, the meaning beneath the words. Every second he fears she’ll stomp down the hallway and throw his door open. He wishes he was allowed to lock it. He wishes she was dead. Another scream, another crack of glass and he presses his hands over his ears, knows he looks childish, knows it but brushes his hands through his hair just above his ear again and again to drown out the sounds of her wrath.

Minutes pass. Hours. The front door opens and shuts and leaves behind silence. He hopes it’s his mother that left, that she didn’t kick his brother out again with nowhere to go. Another hour goes by and he cries, quietly to avoid drawing attention. An hour after that he sneaks into the bathroom and tries to wash away the red splotches on his cheeks and the rims around his eyes, so nobody will ask why he cried when he goes into the kitchen to get food, praying that no one will be there, praying he can just go in and out and hide away in his room.

His mother is there and she sighs like everyone is out to make her life harder. Jesse hates her more with every second he’s forced to listen to her self-righteous grunts.

“You know why I kick him out?” she asks. Jesse knows but shrugs, hums noncommittally. “It’s because when we argue like this, if I had to see his face one more minute I would beat him to death. I know I would, I have that in me. My father was a drunk who beat us and I have the same genes, Jesse, I know I’m capable of it. I’d forget myself and beat him long after he’s dead. That’s why I make him leave, so I won’t hurt him. You understand that, right? That I’m protecting him from myself?”

He nods because what else can he do? He’s weak, he’s scared, he has no power. Until suddenly, he does.

 

“Thought it was my Ma I was fightin’.” he says softly, still staring at his hands. “I never dared lay a hand against her but … it was like I was in the Jaeger but also in that kitchen, y’know? It was weird as hell.” He shudders, shakes his head. “If I’d known ... ”

“You were alone.” you say. “Without training, without warning. We call it ‘chasing the rabbit’, getting lost in a memory during the link, and it’s a miracle you didn’t lose control of your Jaeger at all. The neural link should have broken but you held on.”

You sound urgent, he notes absently, like there’s something you need him to understand. He glances at you from the corner of his eyes and it occurs to him that he never told anyone about his past, that he gave cops the finger who asked him and beat up everyone else. But he told you without hesitation. Your expression softens and whatever you were about to say gets put away for another time.

“ … you wanna see the other Jaegers?”

 

His inner seven-year-old has a mild nervous breakdown over the sight of near thirty Jaegers dominating the backdrop of the Los Angeles Shatterdome. You push him around in a wheelchair, introducing him to every one. You needn’t have to. He knows them all by heart.

“That’s Romeo Blue! I was at the parade after they killed Hardship. And there’s Zulu Mage, they choked the kaiju Hurdle to death with suspension cables. The footage went through the news for weeks. I used to have a tshirt with the shot.”

Some of the Shatterdomes offer tours but Jesse never had the money to even get there. All he ever saw of the Jaegers were news footage and documentaries. And now he’s in the middle of it, surrounded by J-tech crews and the pilots themselves. You point to another Jaeger.

“You know that one?”  
He shakes his head. It’s an intimidating beast of a mech, all sharp angles and black paint, accentuated with streaks of blood red. It’s outfitted with two plasma cannons, powerful enough to tear any kaiju in half but the spread and kickback would make it useless at anything but close range. Its crew is busy repairing damage from its last battle.

“Don’t recognise it.”

“No wonder after that number you did on us.”

A ranger saunters up to them, hands in his pockets and an air of aggravating ego surrounding him. Jesse’s overcome with the urge to punch him in the face or buy him a beer and he has a feeling this guy won't take well to either.

You lean down and speak softly against his ear.

“The Jaeger is Lechuza Renegade, the one we sent against you. That before you is Gabriel Reyes, one of her pilots.”

He gapes open-mouthed at the Jaeger, heart laid bare to repair damage he thought came from a kaiju.

“Don’t even remember, huh?” the ranger, Reyes, says, following his eyes up to his Jaeger. His eyes are fond and though he acts like he invented the concept of pride it’s not undeserved.

“You used to pilot Helix Paragon!” Jesse says, suddenly remembering where he heard that name before. A shadow crosses over Reyes’ face but it’s gone as soon as it comes.

“Yeah. Old rust bucket’s stationed over in Anchorage, though, so you won’t see her for a while. Anyway, just wanted to drop by and tell you no hard feelings. Looking forward to seeing you in action again.”

Reyes leaves, off to go do whatever it is rangers do when they’re not being international celebrities and heroes. For several minutes he’s too starstruck to notice what he said. You push him through a throng of people, tell him what they do but he only listens with half an ear.

“What’d Reyes mean by ‘seeing me in action again’?” he asks. You stop before an empty Jaeger bay, a terrifying three hundred foot drop separating him from an existence as a splat on the ground.

“He’s hoping you’ll agree to my proposal,” you say. “I want you to pilot our new Jaeger.”

 

His first instinct is to say no. Being in the cockpit of that hell machine shook him deep enough to last a lifetime. He never wants to go back to that place and relive the childhood he’s trying to put behind him. But the second thought makes him hesitate. It’s seven-year-old Jesse, with his collection of Jaeger action figures that speaks it, ‘you met Gabriel Reyes and he wants to fight with you’ and ‘you’re in the middle of a Shatterdome and these guys are offering you a job, why are you hesitating, are you insane?’.

You offer him time and a real choice, something no one let him have before. The Jaeger program kept his name out of the system. If he says no, he’ll be free to go and no charges will be pressed. The Jaeger you want him to pilot has just started construction and is supposed to be finished in less than a year, that's the time he gets to decide if he wants to pilot it. It's little time to construct a Jaeger from scratch and when he asks he learns they’re using his own mech as a base for the real thing.

That’s another thing he can’t wrap his head around. When he asks for information, he gets it. No one distrusts him because of his past. They all know who he is and what he did, but all he gets are compliments on piloting skills he didn’t know he had.

It takes him a week to make his decision and the day after that he’s running his first simulation.

There’s no neural handshake in these games, no old memories haunting him and Jesse finds without all that baggage he enjoys himself immensely. It’s every bit as cool as he always thought it’d be and before long he begins thinking of himself as a ranger, as one of the same heroes he admired his whole life.

 

Most days when he comes out of the simulation you’re already waiting for him, usually with dinner he tends to miss over his excitement. You eat together, watching his Jaeger slowly come into its own.

“You won’t let me pilot that thing alone, right?” he asks one day near its completion. He thinks about it increasingly often lately, anxious to be in a real cockpit again after the first time went so disastrously wrong. You ruffle his hair.

“Of course not. What you pulled off was a miracle and it’s best not to rely on those. A second time might kill you for good.”  
He never asked how close he came to dying that day but reading between the lines it’s been a close call. He hums, leans back a little to look at the Jaeger proper. She’s a thing of beauty, solid and lacking the mobility of the miniature she’s based on, but outfitted with long and mid-range weaponry they calibrated to fit his skill sets. She’s deadly accurate, equally effective alone and in a team of several Jaegers. He wants to pilot her, needs to be inside her head and feel her body as his own. He’s in awe of the other Jaegers but this one he loves.

“We put together a shortlist of potential drift compatible candidates. You met some of them.”

“What about you?” he asks before his courage can fail him. You regard him with a look he can’t interpret.

“I’m on the shortlist, yes.”

And that’s when he knows he doesn’t need the list. He made the decision when he told you about his mother before he ever knew he would be in a cockpit again. If he shakes hands with a Jaeger again he’ll do it with you.

 

“Whiskey Deadeye preparing to deploy. Initiating neural handshake in 10 … 9 ... “

“Nervous?” you ask, standing there like it’s not your first time either. In a minute you’ll be in each other’s heads. Whatever it looks like in yours he can’t imagine it’s worse than being stuck alone in his own.

“In your dreams.”

“Don’t bother lying, I’ll know soon enough.”  
He doesn’t need to answer verbally. He’s in the drift again, memories flashing past him rapidly and out of sequence. He sees you, your childhood, your dearest memories, the things no one else knows. He sees his own, smells the alcohol on his mother’s breath but this time you’re there, your voice urges him to let it go.

“Connection stable.”

 

Jesse sees the cockpit before he opens his eyes. There’s a shift, a moment of confusion before he realises he sees through your eyes and it’s his own heavy breathing he hears from three feet away.

“Holy shit.” he says, and he doesn’t know which one of you laughs.

“Ready for your first run?” The voice on the intercom is as familiar as his brother’s even through the static. Deciding on who answers is like deciding which mouth to use. It’s like being in three bodies at once, and only two of them are made from flesh and blood.

“Affirmative. You’ll come along, Lechuza?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

  
  
  


 

 


End file.
